Saturday, 22 March 2008

Ever wish you hadn't started?

The house is coming on fabulously - the hall, stairs and landing are all painted, and the carpet ready to be laid. The kitchen is finished, except for new upvc window surrounds which will be put in next week. The bathroom looks tidy. All in all we're just about ready to have it re-valued.

Yesterday morning we decided that the lounge could do with a quick freshen-up, so we started to paint over the wallpaper with white emulsion. A couple of hours with a roller and paintbrush would brighten up the front room and tie it in with the newly fresh-and-bright downstairs.

Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. Certain areas of the existing wallpaper were a little bit bubbly. White paint being somewhat cruel and unforgiving, the wallpaper bubbles became much more visible, larger-looking and (I swear) more numerous. It looked terrible - do you remember that Aero advert from ages ago, with the annoying little kid pointing out all the bubbles in the newly hung wallpaper to his dad? Well, it looked like that - except with patchy paint because we'd only put up one coat of white over a dark yellow, and it was much bubblier than in the advert.

We hoped that it looked worse because the paper had stretched from getting wet, and that it would dry flat. It didn't.

So then we decided that we had no choice but to strip the room and re-paper it.

One of the glories of wallpaper is that you can't see the state of the walls underneath. As it turns out, this is also a bit of a drawback - especially when removing the wallpaper also removes half the wall...

So far it's taken us two days to strip of the paper (much of which had to be hacked away with a chisel), and tomorrow will be spent with the polyfilla and sandpaper.

With any luck we'll be able to paper by Monday. In hindsight, maybe we should have left well alone - but I suppose we weren't to know, and I'm certain that it'll look lovely when it's done.

At least we hadn't planned to do anything interesting with our Easter weekend ....